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Is this where we're going?
May. 12th, 2021 03:19 pmIn 10 years people are going to be driving cars wearing AR glasses. People will stop putting pictures up on walls; they’ll just decorate virtual rooms and wear the AR glasses to see them.
Security guards will put on AR glasses and all the walls in the building will become transparent.
Sports fans will put on AR glasses and stand in the middle of the field right next to the quarterback while the play is called.
Your face will be your passport. The glasses on your face will help authenticate it. The border patrol agents will see you through their own glasses, with a little icon floating over your head: Time allowed in country: 10 days. Arrest warrants: None. Their views will be kept "secure" by pairing their glasses with their own faces. Headscarves and hoodies will be banned in almost all venues. Concealing who you are from the government - or even just the restaurant owner - will be seen as social deviance.
People will start "livestreaming" much more than just their location. People will leave their glasses engaged in recording everything they see, all the time, in a half-hour loop, so they can tag it if they decide to. Nothing embarrassing or funny that anyone does in public will ever escape recording and potential rebroadcast, ever again. People will get into the habit of rewinding conversations that they are currently engaged in, to prove that someone actually said what they said, minutes earlier. Everyone on earth will go from living in the present, to living about 15 minutes in the past, all the time.
You will unlock doors by looking at them the right way. You will pay for things by staring at the points of a star, in order. Live concerts will either ban the glasses entirely, or make them part of the show. When you share a casual glance across a room, you will send more than just a glance -- you will send contact information, propositions, advertisements. If you don't like the way someone is staring at you, you can blot them out of your vision. If you take your glasses off in public, people will assume you want a quiet moment and don't want to be talked to.
The cities are going to fill up with micro apartments that consist of a closet attached to a closet. The first closet will do what a closet normally does: store clothing. The second closet will be all the rest of the living space in the house combined, including the bed, and a person will put on AR glasses when they get home - assuming they're not wearing them already - and pretend that they are sitting in the middle of the woods. All they'll need is a good air conditioner.
Want to watch that YouTube video? First, watch these ads. No; you can't skip them. You can't look away. The glasses know where you're looking. You will watch these ads. If you shut your eyes more than 5 percent of the time, the ads will start over.
This will become a new way of paying for "free" things. Want a discount while you're pumping gas into your car? Stand there and take the ads. Right in the face. Take them. Take them like you like them.
Somewhere, still wedged inside a security researcher's head, is the design for a foam-rubber 3D-printed human torso, with elaborate electronic eyeballs, designed to trick the glasses. The arms race will be difficult.
Museums, state parks, restaurants, store aisles ... everything, everywhere, will accumulate a digital layer, only available through the AR glasses. Information kiosks and labels will vanish. You will walk through a tangle of completely un-signposted roads and never lose your way, unless you're one of the unfortunate poor who can't pay for the glasses. Those people will be lost in a terrifying labyrinth, and the only solution anyone will seriously offer them ... is free AR glasses. This rabbit hole will only go one way. Don't even think of what Facebook has in store for you.
Meanwhile, in China...
While everyone in the West is arguing over how much privacy to preserve, China will build backdoors into every single Chinese person's AR glasses. You could be in your home, staring into the face of your child, talking to them about an argument they had at school perhaps, and a government agent could be staring at them too, a thousand miles away in a booth. You will never know until ten years later when the recording - indexed by voice transcription software - is presented as evidence to an anonymous panel tasked with deciding whether to arrest you and stick you in a factory prison.
The agents will become almost completely omniscient. While they're locked in a desk, the microphones in every pair of glasses could be tuned to pick up conversation in the next room. If you're standing in a crowded subway, an icon might appear over the man next to you, placed there by the police, identifying that man as a state agitator. This is different from a smartphone alert: You cannot un-see the icon, and the glasses know when they're not on your face. If you get too close to the man, or try to warn him, the flag may appear on you.
If the agents decide they don't like you, they will shut your glasses down. You will instantly lose your wallet, your keys, your phone, your passport, the contact information for everyone you know, and all your notes and photographs and music. You won't even be able to board a bus or buy a sandwich, until you do whatever the agents demand of you.
Dissent will be so thoroughly micromanaged into the noise floor that people will start to think that crushing dissent is part of the normal function of a "free" society. People will start to aspire to getting that well-paid job in government, eavesdropping on people and crushing dissent, since it comes with privileges and power.
Eventually, we will all start to drown in a sea of information warfare. State-sponsored from China (and Russia, basically an appendage of China), and corporate-sponsored from the West. But you can't take off the glasses. They're more you than you are.
Like I said, this rabbit hole only goes one way.
I suspect that in two or three years, Apple will release a flagship product that will usher in this new future. They will be committed to solving or mitigating the flood of privacy and abuse problems this product creates. But then Google will follow up with their own version. And then Samsung. And then others. Privacy will be something you buy back, at a price, in the West. And in China and similar places, it will be something you don't even understand the concept of any more.
Perhaps this beloved tech industry I grew up in is about to create a monster.
Security guards will put on AR glasses and all the walls in the building will become transparent.
Sports fans will put on AR glasses and stand in the middle of the field right next to the quarterback while the play is called.
Your face will be your passport. The glasses on your face will help authenticate it. The border patrol agents will see you through their own glasses, with a little icon floating over your head: Time allowed in country: 10 days. Arrest warrants: None. Their views will be kept "secure" by pairing their glasses with their own faces. Headscarves and hoodies will be banned in almost all venues. Concealing who you are from the government - or even just the restaurant owner - will be seen as social deviance.
People will start "livestreaming" much more than just their location. People will leave their glasses engaged in recording everything they see, all the time, in a half-hour loop, so they can tag it if they decide to. Nothing embarrassing or funny that anyone does in public will ever escape recording and potential rebroadcast, ever again. People will get into the habit of rewinding conversations that they are currently engaged in, to prove that someone actually said what they said, minutes earlier. Everyone on earth will go from living in the present, to living about 15 minutes in the past, all the time.
You will unlock doors by looking at them the right way. You will pay for things by staring at the points of a star, in order. Live concerts will either ban the glasses entirely, or make them part of the show. When you share a casual glance across a room, you will send more than just a glance -- you will send contact information, propositions, advertisements. If you don't like the way someone is staring at you, you can blot them out of your vision. If you take your glasses off in public, people will assume you want a quiet moment and don't want to be talked to.
The cities are going to fill up with micro apartments that consist of a closet attached to a closet. The first closet will do what a closet normally does: store clothing. The second closet will be all the rest of the living space in the house combined, including the bed, and a person will put on AR glasses when they get home - assuming they're not wearing them already - and pretend that they are sitting in the middle of the woods. All they'll need is a good air conditioner.
Want to watch that YouTube video? First, watch these ads. No; you can't skip them. You can't look away. The glasses know where you're looking. You will watch these ads. If you shut your eyes more than 5 percent of the time, the ads will start over.
This will become a new way of paying for "free" things. Want a discount while you're pumping gas into your car? Stand there and take the ads. Right in the face. Take them. Take them like you like them.
Somewhere, still wedged inside a security researcher's head, is the design for a foam-rubber 3D-printed human torso, with elaborate electronic eyeballs, designed to trick the glasses. The arms race will be difficult.
Museums, state parks, restaurants, store aisles ... everything, everywhere, will accumulate a digital layer, only available through the AR glasses. Information kiosks and labels will vanish. You will walk through a tangle of completely un-signposted roads and never lose your way, unless you're one of the unfortunate poor who can't pay for the glasses. Those people will be lost in a terrifying labyrinth, and the only solution anyone will seriously offer them ... is free AR glasses. This rabbit hole will only go one way. Don't even think of what Facebook has in store for you.
Meanwhile, in China...
While everyone in the West is arguing over how much privacy to preserve, China will build backdoors into every single Chinese person's AR glasses. You could be in your home, staring into the face of your child, talking to them about an argument they had at school perhaps, and a government agent could be staring at them too, a thousand miles away in a booth. You will never know until ten years later when the recording - indexed by voice transcription software - is presented as evidence to an anonymous panel tasked with deciding whether to arrest you and stick you in a factory prison.
The agents will become almost completely omniscient. While they're locked in a desk, the microphones in every pair of glasses could be tuned to pick up conversation in the next room. If you're standing in a crowded subway, an icon might appear over the man next to you, placed there by the police, identifying that man as a state agitator. This is different from a smartphone alert: You cannot un-see the icon, and the glasses know when they're not on your face. If you get too close to the man, or try to warn him, the flag may appear on you.
If the agents decide they don't like you, they will shut your glasses down. You will instantly lose your wallet, your keys, your phone, your passport, the contact information for everyone you know, and all your notes and photographs and music. You won't even be able to board a bus or buy a sandwich, until you do whatever the agents demand of you.
Dissent will be so thoroughly micromanaged into the noise floor that people will start to think that crushing dissent is part of the normal function of a "free" society. People will start to aspire to getting that well-paid job in government, eavesdropping on people and crushing dissent, since it comes with privileges and power.
Eventually, we will all start to drown in a sea of information warfare. State-sponsored from China (and Russia, basically an appendage of China), and corporate-sponsored from the West. But you can't take off the glasses. They're more you than you are.
Like I said, this rabbit hole only goes one way.
I suspect that in two or three years, Apple will release a flagship product that will usher in this new future. They will be committed to solving or mitigating the flood of privacy and abuse problems this product creates. But then Google will follow up with their own version. And then Samsung. And then others. Privacy will be something you buy back, at a price, in the West. And in China and similar places, it will be something you don't even understand the concept of any more.
Perhaps this beloved tech industry I grew up in is about to create a monster.
